Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, video teleconferencing devices, and the like. Digital video devices implement video compression techniques, such as those described in the standards defined by MPEG-2, MPEG-4, ITU-T H.263 or ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), and extensions of such standards, to transmit and receive digital video information more efficiently.
An upcoming video coding standard is the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, “HEVC Working Draft 7,” or “WD7,” is described in document HCTVC-11003, Bross et al., “High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Text Specification Draft 7,” Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of ITU-T SG16 WP3 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, 9th Meeting: Geneva, Switzerland, Apr. 27, 2012 to May 7, 2012, which, as of Jun. 25, 2102, is downloadable from http://phenix.it-sudparis.eu/jct/doc_end_user/documents/9_Geneva/wg11/JCTVC-11003-v3.zip. Another HEVC working draft, referred to as “HEVC Working Draft 6” or “WD6,” is described in document JCTVC-H1003, Bross et al., “High efficiency video coding (HEVC) text specification draft 6,” Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of ITU-T SG16 WP3 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, 8th Meeting: San Jose, Calif., USA, February, 2012, which, as of Jun. 25, 2012, is downloadable from http://phenix.int-evry.fr/jct/doc_end_user/documents/8_San_Jose/wg11/JCTVC-H1003-v22.zip.
Video compression techniques perform spatial prediction and/or temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences. For block-based video coding, a video frame or slice may be partitioned into blocks. Each block can be further partitioned. Blocks in an intra-coded (I) frame or slice are encoded using spatial prediction with respect to neighboring blocks. Blocks in an inter-coded (P or B) frame or slice may use spatial prediction with respect to neighboring blocks in the same frame or slice or temporal prediction with respect to data of previously coded reference frames.